You remind me that when you first asked for the “maybe divorce” I asked for a year to try and make our marriage better. Now, 2 1/2 years later, me doing the hard work of psychotherapy, and you working your dick into a constant state of arousal as you thought about her; you want 6 months to show you that you do love me and want to be with me…FOREVER. So let me ask you:

He was instructed by his therapist that he had to tell me the truth and answer any question I might have even if it is six months from now. And this is what I have learned.

She has a much better wardrobe than me. My daughter noticed this phenomena when she said, ” Hey mom, look at her pictures when you met her. Her clothes were awful but the longer she was in this affair with Dad she got nicer clothes, better haircuts and fashion forward glasses. Yes, the mistress has matchy, matchy shoes, dress and purses to accessorize to the max when she is walking the red carpet. I have NEVER had matching anything except boobs that have slid downhill as I have aged. Anytime I would buy a $15.99 TJMAX shirt B would say, “When did you get that?” Anyway, seems he sent over $7000 to her and her family in Vietnam. Of course, it was to provide baby vitamins for her sister’s child and for her to buy food for the children at the orphanages. It is just coincidental that her wardrobe could rival a rock stars because “she is not that type of woman. She never wanted anything from me.”

2. Yes, there were times that he was messaging her from our home and I would ask who he was talking with and he would accuse me of being paranoid and make me feel bad about the kind of “suspicious” person that I was.

3. He was the one who suggested that they meet in Singapore. When I asked why he was there for four days without doing business he said he needed some down time. I guess that means down flat on his back while he was ridden like a stallion. What I am most pissed off about is where is the THANK YOU card from her for teaching him how to please and pleasure a woman. All that work over the years, from minute man to rocket man, and I don’t even get kudos from the recipient of my vast sexual knowledge.

4. He, as a rich middle-aged man white man, convinced her sister, a single impoverished very young woman in a third world country, to keep the baby she was going to abort. I suspect that one of the reasons she did not was that she was convinced he was going to marry her sister. Does he have any obligations to this child since he participated in a family decision to keep this baby boy? (and no it is not his)

5. This story is not unique in B’s family. His brother went looking for Russian brides spending all his money (and he had lots) on these women until he married one who would not sign a pre-nup and after their marriage would not move to the USA. B saw how his brother was soaked but “this is not the same. She is not that way.”

6. He looked into fiance visas.

7. Of course, he gave her up for me about two weeks ago after giving me a commitment ring on Christmas but continued to talk with her. BLAH!

8. With 10 minutes of knowing that I knew about them she put up pictures of her and B in Singapore along with a heart in which their hands are intertwined.

So as a wrap up. B has conducted this affair for almost three years while I was sending money to her (our tour guide in DaNang Vietnam) and books for her father. I ate lunch at her family’s home and met her parents and sister. He sent her thousands of dollars over the years and his sister was friends with his mistress on Facebook. She has at least four different Facebook pages with four different names. B told me he was going to Singapore on business, when in fact, it was slutty cum dumpster business. All of this while I was working hard in individual and marital counseling to improve our marriage while he was working on his relationship with her and making me feel like crap so that he could live with his guilt. Meanwhile, our children are falling apart, autism rearing its oh-so-destructive head and I have aged 10 years in two days. Oh, and the house we were selling…the guy backed out on the day he was suppose to sign.

And he LOVES (cough) me and wants to make it work.

While we were working on our marriage he used to say “I am not sure I love you. I hope to get it back but it might take 6 months or a year or that love might not ever return. Are you willing to wait?”

So Thursday B walked in the door ashen and with tears in his eyes. After 14 years of being the president of his company he was sacked. I said and did all the right things, loved on him and told him everything would be okay. I was the perfect wife.

After several hours of being at home he decided to download all the family pictures from his phone onto my computer since he was afraid his company would turn off his phone. Since then my computer has been running slow because he added over 2,000 pictures to it so today I decided to delete some after moving them to The Cloud. As I was going through them…SURPRISE!!!! …..I found a naked picture of a woman. Long story short, it was our tour guide from Viet Nam. The woman I had been sending money to occasionally to help her family….guess she decided to go after a bigger fish…B!

B confessed that he has been communicating with her for 1 1/2 years. That he has thought of going to see her….wonder if that is why he was so adamant that I could not go to China with him? I asked him if he has communicated with her since he gave me the commitment ring…he has…yep, that is commitment for you! I told him I wondered if that was one of the reasons he got fired because IT saw numerous naked pictures on his electronic devices.

Frankly, I feel good. Glad to know that my suspicions were not unfounded. Glad to know that these past two years have really been about him and not me. Glad to find out that he is a sex addict according to him. Yes, I am glad to know all of it. Glad to know he gave me the commitment ring on Christmas and talked to her after. Glad to know that when he sent the text from Boy Scout Camp that he wasn’t sure he had the passion or love to sustain our relationship, that he had just received naked pictures from her. I am glad to know all of this because now I know that I need to believe and trust in myself and I know without a doubt that he had one foot out of the door and was not giving me his all. And now I know what I need to do.

P.S. And to all of you who have told me so…I am sorry I didn’t believe you or kinda didn’t believe you. I was a fool.

This morning I had a long overdue coffee date with a wonderful woman. We are about the same age and are both on the road of discovery about ourselves while deciding what we want the second half of our lives to look like. We have a lot in common in many regards and I hope she is on the way to becoming a good friend.

After coffee was over it occurred to me how much I miss having close female friends. Sometimes I miss it so much it feels like a piece of me has been ripped away and left abandoned out on an isolated road. Alone.

Don’t get me wrong I have some wonderful friends. But due to our constant moving or their moving; these women that I cherish and love are scattered throughout the United States. There is N… my been with me forever friend who has seen me through my youthful indiscretions and has nursed me through the past year. There is C who knew me as a teen and with whom I share a birthday. There is L who makes life something to laugh at and enjoy to the fullest even when I am whining like a baby. And there are several other special ladies who I know would be there for me if I picked up the phone. But what I need at this juncture of my life, and what I miss most, are a couple of good girlfriends to go to coffee with every Thursday to catch up on each others lives.

It is hard making friends at my age. It’s an art really. The type of art I have really never possessed in sufficient quantities… because I don’t do acquaintances. I do… “I’ll save your life if you’re in a raging river”… types of friends. I would do anything for them and they would do just about anything for me. These are the plunging off a cliff, Thelma and Louise, kinds of friends. Frankly, there are not a lot of people I want to risk my life for or go down with at my age. But I am still willing to try to find those kinds of inspiring and fun people and offer them all that I have to give… which is quite a lot.

There are other reasons I find making friends difficult. Sometimes when you have special needs children with challenges it makes it difficult to make friends. Most people have no clue of all the things you have to do to make your life work. They don’t understand when you have to cancel at the last-minute because of a major meltdown that is occurring ten minutes before you are supposed to meet. And being around others whose children also have challenges can be draining for both people because it seems as if too often you are both drowning at once and just holding on by the thinnest of branches. While things have improved in my household sometimes I feel like past behaviors hold me back because I am unsure when those issues will rear their ugly heads again. It makes me afraid to risk “those” looks and “those” whispers from someone I thought was special only to find that they really aren’t. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t how my sons with autism feel.

There is also the issue that most women’s lives are so full that they barely have time for the friends they currently have much less making time for someone new in their lives. With old friends you know what you have and how to relate. Most people just don’t have the energy to figure out the quirks of a stranger. And I get all of this. I truly do. But damn, it just means that so many of us are missing out on something that is so good.

But really, I don’t want a lot of friends. I just want a small group of coffee klatching Thursday morning women to hang with. Some 40-60 something gals who won’t try to convert me. Won’t try to change me. And will love me despite all my idiosyncracies.

With all the lonely people out there you would think it wouldn’t be that hard to find but it is. Which makes me thankful for all that I do have in my life. Yet, I am greedy and I want more. Much, much more.

Recently my therapist introduced me to The Place of Mysteries. It’s a place I have come to cherish and love. It’s a place to hold all the unanswered questions I have been carrying around from the past. It’s a place I can come back to when I have more information and either remove the questions/issues completely from The Place of Mysteries or put them back into holding for scrutinization at a different time.

As my therapist explains it, The Place Of Mysteries is kind of like a closet in your mind. Sometimes it is a fully organized place and sometimes it is packed to the brim with haphazard stuff. Occasionally you have to go into it and take everything out and separate it into three piles: the trash, the giveaway and the keep.

The trash pile is for those things that are resolved and you just don’t need them anymore. Off they go, forever hauled away from your psyche in a big rubbish truck never to be seen again.

The giveaway pile exists to allow yourself to let go of an issue/s and give the issue/s back to the person with whom they really belong. Since I tend to carry around everyone else’s shit I am looking to give it back to the rightful owners by refusing to put it in my closet in the first place or refusing to put it back. If I can accomplish this I suspect I will have a lot of room in this previously overused and cramped space of The Place of Mysteries.

The keep pile is for those still unresolved issues/situations. Gwenniffer has made herself at home in here. I’ll know she is there but I will not look at her unless another piece of information arrives and which time I may compare both pieces and see if they fit together or not. If they do not fit they will go into the trash pile but if they do I can then make an intelligent decision about what I will do with this newly obtained information and how it relates to what I know from before. It is nice to have a place for Gwenniffer rather than having her riding around on my back or inhabiting my head at the most inopportune times.

While The Place Of Mysteries doesn’t begin to answer my all questions it does hold the information in a place away from constant viewing. And while I may have picked up on something concerning Gwenniffer, I do not yet know for sure what that is, so… into The Place Of Mysteries she goes; the holding place for mysteries until they are solved.

Maybe the Gwenniffer issue will never be solved. That is possible. Or maybe at some point I will take Gwenniffer out and just throw her away on my own. But until that day comes, she is sitting in The Place Of Mysteries, out-of-the-way, in the dark, right where she belongs probably sitting next to my missing black patent leather stiletto.

It has been interesting to me that I have been composing these recent pieces in a somewhat poetic form. I ponder why because I never choose to write in this particular style. And what occurs to me is that right now I feel raw, sad and the confusion is deep and so in writing in an unfamiliar style it almost makes it feel that it is not me that this is happening to. I am incapable of organizing my thoughts in a traditional piece so I must not be that OTHER woman, that sad one, the poetic one, who might very well end up divorced.

Yep, I am just floating down De’Nile.

THREE HOURS POST GWENNIFERR

CRAZY

Sometimes I feel like Hillary Clinton

Ignoring what appears to be in front of me for the greater good

But sometimes I wonder if you are the type of man

That slowly drives his wife crazy

Sweet and caring

Sexy and funny

Giving and kind in so many important ways

A good family man folks would say

With a part that is hidden from the public that longs to stray

I did my sexual experimentation when I was young

You didn’t

Are you wishing you had?

What is it you think you are missing?

It’s true

I’ve never “caught” you with another woman

There have been uncomfortable/inappropriate texts

A picture of another woman

And a very strange business card belonging to a woman

You swear you have no idea how THAT got in your wallet

There have been entire nights you were unreachable on business trips

We even laughed that you must be the most unlucky man in the world

When you are alone…even the front desk messes up

Must have rang the wrong room

Even though they were different hotels, different stays

Because you were in your room…all night

Oh yes, and there was that condom under our bed that I found when we were moving…maybe it was our teenager

And now Gwenniferr…again

Why the lie if everything is innocent?

But even worse, it is a stupid reckless lie

These are small things….distant enough from one another

Occurring here and there…not everyday…not every year

But when added up

Make you appear to be untrustworthy to me

Why don’t you just come clean?

There is nothing to come clean of you insist

And so I feel crazy

Maybe look crazy too

And you accuse me of not trusting you

And I don’t

For good reasonS

How can you have a marriage without trust?

We have for a while now

It’s made our bones brittle, our lungs empty, hearts heavy

And finally I realize that you can’t live without trust

Can counseling fix this?

I don’t know

Maybe it is over

And we just don’t know it yet

FOUR HOURS POST GWENNIFER

SPECIAL

I used to think our marriage was special

I really truly used to believe that with all my heart

When did that stop?

Today for sure

Before then…probably

We were friends, I thought

Fantastic lovers, I knew

Allies, maybe? sometimes

And I always thought

That you would be the one holding my hand when I passed on

Now I realize we just had a marriage

There was nothing special about it at all

It was just a plain ordinary marriage

Like everyone else has

A marriage of ups and downs

Of good and bad

Of happiness and sorrow

Of kindness and love

Of children and grandchildren

Of travel and adventure

But now the only thing left is the fantastic lover part

And that is not enough for me anymore

Trust….gone

Admiration…fled the scene

Truth…never

Friendship…well the therapist says we don’t have it

You wanted to like me again

I wanted the same of you

And then Gwenniferr re-emerged

Once again reminding me

We have less than a marriage

Because a marriage is built on truth and trust

And at this time ours appears to be built on sand

FIVE HOURS POST GWENNIFERR

HARMLESS

Your innocent flirting you said was harmless

Your unhappiness you felt until you wanted a D.I.V.O.R.C.E. was harmless

Your dishonesty was avoidance and therefore harmless

Your relationship with Gwenniferr is nothing, it’s harmless

She is like a sister to you, harmless

Your relationship to me that is imploding…harmless

Destroying our family…harmless

Your look-me-in-the-eye I’m telling you the truth, harmless

Your relationship with your children, maybe on your way to becoming a weekend father…harmless

Your innocence astounds me

And your harmless actions seer my soul

Permanent scars carved into my skin

One at a time over years

Looking like a tattoo of dragon talons swooping down

Cutting and digging into flesh

You BRAND my soul with your harmlessness

And it doesn’t feel harmless at all

How did we get from this this song that we played at our 25th Wedding Anniversary to where we are now? I don’t understand